Every year on my birthday (July 19th), I write a poem called “The Anatomy of a ___-year-old boy. It’s my birthday today and I’d like to share with you all the poem I just wrote:

Let’s start with the head.

We found the skull to be very thick and stubborn to get
through. One surgeon working on this operation swears
in his testimony that at one point after successfully opening
the skull that he watched the skull close back in on
itself, though this could not be confirmed (nor denied.)

Upon successfully surgically opening the head directly down the
center we were able to begin our studies with a very profound
journey into the central work station of the twenty-four year old
boy. It seems the subject’s mind is fairly saturated with high levels
of dreams,
however, it is worth noting that these dreams are clotted with
equally high levels of thoughts on the female gender:
There were several times during the operation where we had
to enter the brain to rewire the shifting eyes to focus on the
subject at hand.

On that note, the subject’s eyes rarely seemed willing to look
at one thing for too long. The subject was easily distracted
by outrageous ideas, some as far-fetched as doing what he
loved for a living.

Upon searching the mouth, we were clued in that the subject
may suffer from attention deficit disorder, when leftover bits
of Adderall (Amphetamine) were detected hanging on
for dear life at the back of the throat. It is important to note
that this may in fact be the residual effects of a misdiagnosis
but our tests were inconclusive one way or the other.

The subjects bones were made out of a foreign material
unseen in any of our previous cadaverous experiments. Several
chemical tests were unable to identify the substance, but
a brief but luckily contained accident by an intern where a
flammable substance was spilled on the subjects bones led us
to the undeniable conclusion that the subject’s bones, head to
toe, were composed of strike-anywhere matches. The subject,
as we then learned, is highly combustible; it seemed the slightest
spark could set our subject on fire.

Upon examination we were able to monitor the subjects’
heartbeat; and what we found there was most astounding;
not only did the subject have an arrhythmic heartbeat, it seemed
the subject’s heartbeat was reactive to whatever music was playing
in his head. Ranging from classics, such as the Beatles to newer
inquiries, such as Foster the People, it seemed the subject was
completely at the whim of music. Our psycho-surgical analysts
were starting to gain concern that the subject may be too fragile
to undergo this surgery. Everything we were seeing underneath
the skin was substantially honest and vulnerable. (I disagreed with
our psycho-surgical analysts on the proposal of concluding our
endeavors. Personally having counseled the subject prior to
inoculation, I saw the great vigor with which he wrote his sworn
affidavit aggreeing to the procedure.) As if our finding with
the subject’s heart weren’t intriguing enough, later tests showed in
rare, nevertheless consistently intermittent moments, the subject’s
heart would stop beating all together. It brought a wave of fear
over the operation the first time, but we quickly found undeniable
evidence that though this subject’s heart concretely did stop
pulsating time to time, that it did always begin again, always
back to its normal frantic pace.

There was a certain correspondence we were able to identify
between the systolic beat of the heart and the left leg, and the
diastolic beat of the heart, and the right leg. One doctor remarked,
and we all agreed, that the subject marched to the beat of his
own drummer.

Though no tests were performed, I noticed a certain shakiness
in the subject’s hands through much of the testing. As if the
subject wanted to feel everything that was happening to him.
Or maybe as if there was some passion that he was suffering from
anxiety to get back to doing. On a less professional, and more
poetic note, it seemed as if he was typing on the air. As if even in
the midst of this numb surgery he was crafting something.
I couldn’t help but notice.

Government funding only allotted us so much funding for this
endeavor so from there I thought it best to conclude, hoping next
year to re-up our grant and continue to study the anatomy
of a twenty-five year old boy.